Modern telecommunication systems provide users with facilities to enable a degree of personalisation of both telecommunication services and telecommunication devices.
For instance, many telephone services enable users to set up multiple call routing options to provide a highly customisable and personalised telephone service. For example, a user may instruct a telephone network to forward calls intended for his telephone subscriber number to a different telephone subscriber number. A user may also instruct a telephone network to forward calls made to a telephone subscriber number whilst that number is busy to be forwarded to a voice mail service.
Similarly, a user may customise a device, such as a mobile telephone, so that the device operates in a personalised manner. For example, a user may configure a mobile telephone to use a vibrating ringing alert rather than a ring tone in certain situations.
As the user's activity changes through a day so the user may wish to modify the way in which any personalisation options are configured. For example, when a user is at work, he may wish to instruct his residential telephone network to forward any calls made to his residential telephone subscriber number to his office telephone subscriber number. If the user is sleeping, the user may wish that all calls made to his residential telephone subscriber number are immediately forwarded to the user's voice mail service, or he may wish that his mobile telephone vibrates rather than rings when an incoming call is received.
Users may also use more than one customisable service or device, such as, for example, a residential telephone network and a mobile telephone network, a landline telephone, a mobile telephone and a personal computing device. Each service and device may need personalising in a different way depending on the activity of the user.
However, one drawback with the current situation is that the user of such systems or devices has to ensure that any personalisation is constantly updated to ensure that the personalisation accurately reflects the users current desired personalisation options. For example, if a user is away from his home telephone and wishes all calls made to his home subscriber number to be forwarded to his mobile telephone subscriber the user has to actively instruct the home telephony network to forward all calls in the desired manner. If, when back at home, the user wishes to receive all calls made to his mobile telephone subscriber number to be forwarded to his home telephone subscriber number the user has to instruct both the mobile network or mobile device to forward calls to the home telephone subscriber number, and must also instruct the home telephone network to cancel forwarding calls to the mobile telephone subscriber number.
The current situation is thus somewhat unsatisfactory as users have to ensure that each of their personalisable services or devices are correctly configured at all times if they wish their services and devices to function in the anticipated manner. Furthermore the user has to know how to configure each device or service, with each device and service likely being configurable in different manners and to different extents.